TUESDAY POEM - The Silence of The Stars by David Wagoner

I posted this poem earlier this year but because it's a favourite and because night skies with random constellations of stars seem to be at the tip of my paint brush these days, I'm posting it again. . .  

Night Watch (details from work in progress - Oil on Paper)

     

                 THE SILENCE OF THE STARS

                     When Laurens van der Post one night

                     In the Kalahari Desert told the Bushmen

                     He couldn't hear the stars

                     Singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him,

                     half-smiling. They examined his face

                     To see whether he was joking

                     Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men

                     Who plant nothing, who have almost

                     Nothing to hunt, who live

                     On almost nothing, and with no one

                     But themselves, led him away

                     From the crackling thorn-scrub fire

                     And stood with him under the night sky

                     And listened. One of them whispered,

                     Do you not hear them now?

                     And van der Post listened, not wanting

                     To disbelieve, but had to answer,

                     No. They walked him slowly

                     Like a sick man to the small dim

                     Circle of firelight and told him

                     They were terribly sorry,

                     And he felt even sorrier

                     For himself and blamed his ancestors

                     For their strange loss of hearing,

                     Which was his loss now. On some clear night

                     When nearby houses have turned off their visions,

                     When the traffic dwindles, when through streets

                     Are between sirens and the jets overhead

                     Are between crossings, when the wind

                     Is hanging fire in the fir trees,

                     And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove

                     Between calls is regarding his own darkness,

                     I look at the stars again as I first did

                     To school myself in the names of constellations

                     And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,

                     I can still hear what I thought

                     At the edge of silence where the inside jokes

                     Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,

                     The C above high C of my inner ear, myself

                     Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:

                     My fair share of the music of the spheres

                     And clusters of ripening stars,

                     Of the songs from the throats of the old gods

                     Still tending ever tone-deaf creatures

                     Through their exiles in the desert.

                     David Wagoner

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is Renee Liang 
with Transport
by Riemke Ensing

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